Posted
by
BeauHDon Thursday August 17, 2017 @09:25PM
from the video-hosting dept.

An anonymous reader shares a report from Variety: Videos are coming to Reddit, thanks to a new feature that allows users to upload video clips directly to the service. Reddit rolled out the new video feature Tuesday after testing it with around 200 communities over the past couple of weeks. Reddit users are now able to upload videos of up to 15 minutes in length, with file sizes being limited to 1 gigabyte. Users will be able to upload videos via Reddit's website and its mobile apps for iOS and Android, with the latter offering basic trimming functionality as well. And, in keeping with the spirit of the site, Reddit is also offering a conversion tool to turn videos into animated Gifs. Videos are being displayed persistently, or pinned, meaning that users can scroll through the comments while the video keeps playing in the corner of their screen. And community moderators can opt not to allow videos in their Subreddits at all, with Le arguing that some discussion-heavy Subreddits may decide that the format just doesn't work for them.

Posted
by
BeauHDon Thursday August 17, 2017 @03:00AM
from the streaming-obligations dept.

According to the Streaming Observer, Netflix plans to increase its budget by $1 billion dollars over the next year and spend over $7 billion on content in 2018. Previously, the company paid $6 billion in 2017 and $5 billion in 2016. From the report: While the internet freaks out about Disney ending its streaming agreement with Netflix, the company continues to forge ahead signing high-profile talent and throwing an enormous budget at its original programming. Just days after the Disney turmoil, Netflix's visionary Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos stated that the streaming leader plans to increase its budget by $1 billion dollars over the next year. As of now, Netflix currently has $15.7 billion in outstanding obligations in deals for new series and films over the next few years. With such an astronomically-large budget, media analysts are already beginning to wonder if Netflix is "rescuing" or "ruining" Hollywood by creating such a singular creator-producer-distributor model. Sarandos counters those claims, however, stating that Netflix is merely on the forefront of what's already a growing trend throughout the media industries: "I would say that the relationship between studios and networks has always been that of a frenemy. Everyone is doing some version of it already. They just have to make a decision for their companies, their brands and their shareholders on how to best optimize the content. We started making original content five years ago, betting this would happen."

Posted
by
BeauHDon Wednesday August 16, 2017 @09:25PM
from the out-of-step dept.

According to a report from The New York Times, Hollywood continues to praise plus-sized actresses in knockout roles and then reduce them to bit parts about physical weight. Slashdot reader cdreimer shares an excerpt from the report: The first thing Danielle Macdonald did at the Cannes Film Festival in May was break into a cold sweat: The airline had lost her luggage. She was already nervous enough. Ms. Macdonald, 26, had been plucked from obscurity to play the lead role in "Patti Cake$," a drama about a rapper that was about to face the Cannes critics. Now she had to find something glamorous to wear -- pronto -- to the premiere. "As a bigger girl," Ms. Macdonald told me recently, "where was I meant to find something that would fit?" Her story then veered in an unexpected direction -- revealing her approach to Hollywood, which expects its lead actresses to be scarily skinny. "I gave myself a pep talk," she said. "This situation is what it is. Find a way to work around it." The red carpet crisis was resolved (another "Patti Cake$" star, Cathy Moriarty, lent her a black dress), but if the experiences of countless actresses before Ms. Macdonald are any indication, it will not be as easy to overcome the career obstacles that await her post-"Patti Cake$."

For women -- less so for men -- weight is perhaps the most stubborn of the entertainment industry's many biases. Have an average-sized body? Call us when you've starved yourself. In particular, Ms. Macdonald must avoid a cycle that plays out over and over in moviedom, one that some film agents coarsely call the fat flavor of the moment. A plus-size actress, almost always an unknown, lands the central role in a film and delivers a knockout performance. She is held up by producers and the entertainment news media as refreshing, long overdue evidence that Hollywood's insistence on microscopic waistlines is ending. And then she is slowly but surely pushed into bit parts, many of which are defined by weight.

Posted
by
BeauHDon Wednesday August 16, 2017 @07:20PM
from the lay-down-the-law dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Earlier this year Roku was harshly confronted with this new piracy crackdown when a Mexican court ordered local retailers to take its media player off the shelves. While this legal battle isn't over yet, it was clear to Roku that misuse of its platform wasn't without consequences. While Roku never permitted any infringing content, it appears that the company has recently made some adjustments to better deal with the problem, or at least clarify its stance. Pirate content generally doesn't show up in the official Roku Channel Store but is directly loaded onto the device through third-party "private" channels. A few weeks ago, Roku renamed these "private" channels to "non-certified" channels, while making it very clear that copyright infringement is not allowed. A "WARNING!" message that pops up during the installation of these third-party channels stresses that Roku has no control over the content. In addition, the company notes that these channels may be removed if it links to copyright infringing content.

"By continuing, you acknowledge you are accessing a non-certified channel that may include content that is offensive or inappropriate for some audiences," Roku's warning reads. "Moreover, if Roku determines that this channel violates copyright, contains illegal content, or otherwise violates Roku's terms and conditions, then ROKU MAY REMOVE THIS CHANNEL WITHOUT PRIOR NOTICE."

Posted
by
BeauHDon Wednesday August 16, 2017 @05:20PM
from the pick-and-choose dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Mashable: Most people turn to Netflix to binge watch full seasons of a single TV show, but there could be a much cheaper way: YouTube. You might be surprised to learn that you can watch full episodes of popular TV shows on YouTube for free, thanks to a large number of rogue accounts that are hosting illegal live streams of shows. Perhaps the most shocking thing about these free (and very illegal) TV live streams might even make their way into your suggested video queue, if you watch enough "random shit" and Bobby Hill quote compilations on the site, as Mashable business editor Jason Abbruzzese recently experienced. He first noticed the surprisingly high number of illegal TV streaming accounts on his YouTube homepage, which has tailored recommended videos based on his viewing habits. Personalized recommendations aren't exactly new -- but the number of illegal live streams broadcasting copyrighted material on a loop was a shocker. When we looked deeper into the livestreams, the number we found was mindblowing. Many of these accounts appear to exist solely to give watchers an endless loop of their favorite shows and only have a few other posts related to the live streamed content. "YouTube respects the rights of copyright holders and we've invested heavily in copyright and content management tools to give rights holders control of their content on YouTube," a YouTube spokesperson told Mashable in an email. "When copyright holders work with us to provide reference files for their content, we ensure all live broadcasts are scanned for third party content, and we either pause or terminate streams when we find matches to third party content."

Posted
by
msmash
on Wednesday August 16, 2017 @10:00AM
from the big-money dept.

Apple is officially open for business in Hollywood. From a report: The company is telling content makers it wants to spend $1 billion on its own stuff over the next year. That's music to studios' ears, and a tune they have been expecting for some time -- especially after Apple hired two top Sony TV executives in June. We still don't know what Apple wants to do with that content: The Wall Street Journal says Apple wants to make up to 10 "Game of Thrones" -- or "House of Cards"-scale shows, but that's not enough to launch a full-scale subscription service.

Posted
by
msmash
on Tuesday August 15, 2017 @12:00PM
from the more-options dept.

Mitch Lowe, a founder of Netflix, has a crazy idea. Through his new startup MoviePass, he wants to subsidize our film habit, letting us go to the theater once a day for about the price of a single ticket. From a report: Lowe, an early Netflix executive who now runs a startup called MoviePass, plans to drop the price of the company's movie ticket subscriptions on Tuesday to $9.95. The fee will let customers get in to one showing every day at any theater in the U.S. that accepts debit cards. MoviePass will pay theaters the full price of each ticket used by subscribers, excluding 3D or Imax screens. MoviePass could lose a lot of money subsidizing people's movie habits. So the company also raised cash on Tuesday by selling a majority stake to Helios and Matheson Analytics, a small, publicly traded data firm in New York. [...] Theater operators should certainly welcome any effort to increase sales. The top four cinema operators, led by AMC Entertainment, lost $1.3 billion in market value early this month after a disappointing summer.

Posted
by
EditorDavid
on Monday August 14, 2017 @06:30AM
from the 4K-ok dept.

An anonymous reader quotes 4K.com:
Samsung Electronics has announced that its premium Smart TV content service, TV Plus, is now available for users of Samsung Smart TVs in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom... Owners of eligible Samsung Smart TVs with 4K / HDR capabilities in the above-mentioned European countries now have direct access to premium 4K UHD HDR content offered by Samsung, in partnership with Rakuten TV, and can find their favorite shows using the TV Plus straightforward interface... The expansion comes at what could be considered a strategically well timed moment in the European market, given that 4K TV sales in the huge continental market are steadily growing year by year and are expected to rise to over 17 million 4K TV units shipped by the end of 2017. Meanwhile, TV Plus content has become a success in Southeast Asia since its launch, where 70% of Smart TV users in Korea are watching TV PLUS channels, and 41% of Smart TV users in Vietnam are using TV PLUS.

Now Douglass is crowdfunding a libre recording of Bach's last masterpiece, 20 fugues developed from a single theme called "the Art of the Fugue". "He wanted to culminate in a final fugue that literally spells his name, B-A-C-H, in musical notation," remembers Douglass, but "unfortunately, Bach died before completing that work, and it has remained a musical mystery (and tragedy) for hundreds of years." Fortunately Kimiko Ishizaka completed the work in 2016, "based on the music that Bach left us... This new composition will also be released under a Creative Commons license as part of the new OpenScore.cc project... Kimiko is eminently grateful to her fans and supporters of free culture for allowing her to focus all of her energies on growing the public domain and bringing the music of J.S. Bach to a far broader audience than ever imagined."
They're also rewarding supporters with tickets to two live performances -- one at Carnegie Hall in New York City and one in Hamburg's new Elbphilharmonie.

Posted
by
EditorDavid
on Saturday August 12, 2017 @11:59PM
from the back-to-the-future dept.

In 1989 Mondo 2000 magazine ran an editorial promising they'd cover "the leading edge in hyperculture...the latest in human/technological interactive mutational forms as they happen." 28 years later, they're now heckling that editorial as they relaunch into a web site. Slashdot reader DevNull127 quotes Motherboard's interview with R.U. Sirius, the founder of Mondo 2000 (as well as its predecessors High Frontiers and Reality Hackers):
"It was my idea to merge psychedelics and emerging technologies, and the culture around technology," Sirius said, citing Timothy Leary, writer Robert Anton Wilson and counterculture magazine The Whole Earth Catalog among his inspirations... "I kind of found my way into that particular stream of bohemian culture. It was probably a minority, but there had always been that idea of letting robots replace human work." Soon High Frontiers evolved into a glossy magazine, Reality Hackers ("Some distributors at the time thought it was about hacking people up, and put it on the shelf next to murder mystery magazines"), and later Mondo 2000, which ran from 1989 till 1998...

"We really had to work to convince people that technology was defining the future. Nobody really got it. Doug Rushkoff wrote his book Cyberia, and his first book company cancelled its publication because they said the internet was a fad and that it would be over by the time the book came out"... While he uses Facebook and Twitter, Sirius is critical of their role in colonising what was once a more democratic and open space. "People are being herded into little buildings -- or huge ones -- in what was supposed to be a wide open space in which everybody created their own sites. It's a complete corporate takeover of the net, Facebook in particular... It's definitely not what we were expecting." Mondo 2000's new online relaunch includes audio of a conversation between William Gibson and Timothy Leary about a Neuromancer game to accompany a proposed film back in 1989. (Gibson complained "That was no interview! That was a drunken business meeting!" when first informed of the magazine's plans to publish it, though he eventually "became friendly.")
There's also a 1987 discussion about mind technologies with 73-year-old William S. Burroughs (who was also "an advocate of high technology, and the 'brain machine'"), plus an unpublished John Shirley essay titled "The Next Fifty Years: Why I'm Optimistic Because Everything Will Be Terrible" and new pieces by Paul Krassner ("Alternative Facts") and M.Christian ("La Petite Mort: The Death Of Sex").

Posted
by
EditorDavid
on Saturday August 12, 2017 @06:44PM
from the when-I-get-all-steamed-up dept.

An anonymous reader quotes Gizmodo: An anonymous reader quotes Gizmodo:
It started back in 1998 as an April Fool's Day gag. Written up by Larry Masinter of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), error code 418 -- "I'm a teapot" -- was nothing more than a poke at the "many bad HTTP extensions that had been proposed". Despite its existence as a joke, a number of major software projects, including Node.js, ASP.NET and Google's Go language, implemented it as an Easter egg. A recent attempt to excise the fictitious code from these projects ended up doing the opposite, cementing it as a "reserved" error by the IETF...

Australian programmer Mark Nottingham flagged the code's removal as an "issue" for Google's Go language, the Node.js Javascript runtime and Microsoft's ASP.NET... Nottingham's argument was that 418 was "polluting [the] core protocol" of these projects... It didn't take long for a "Save 418" website to go live and through the efforts of interested internet historians (and jokers), all three of the aforementioned projects have decided to keep the code as it is, though Google will "revisit" the situation with the next major version of Go.
The Save 418 site argued that "the application of such an status code is boundless. Its utility, quite simply, is astonishingly unparalleled. It's a reminder that the underlying processes of computers are still made by humans. It'd be a real shame to see 418 go."

Posted
by
BeauHDon Friday August 11, 2017 @08:45PM
from the active-discussions dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Netflix is in "active discussions" with Disney about keeping Marvel and "Star Wars" films after 2019, when new Disney and Pixar movies will stop appearing on the streaming service, a senior executive said late on Thursday. Disney announced on Tuesday that it was pulling new Disney and Pixar films from Netflix, starting with new releases in 2019. It will start putting the movies on a new Disney-branded online service that year. Disney Chief Executive Officer Bob Iger told analysts the company had not yet decided where it would distribute superhero films from Marvel Studios and movies from "Star Wars" producer Lucasfilm, which the company owns, at that time. Netflix is still in discussions with Disney about retaining rights to stream Marvel and Lucasfilm releases after 2019, Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos told Reuters.

Posted
by
BeauHDon Friday August 11, 2017 @08:05PM
from the just-in-the-nick-of-time dept.

Last month, SoundCloud announced it was cutting about 40 percent of its staff in a cost-cutting move to help it compete against larger rivals like Spotify and Apple. One week after that announcement, TechCrunch published a report claiming "the layoffs only saved the company enough money to have runway 'until Q4' -- which begins in just 80 days." It now appears the company has closed the necessary funding round to keep itself afloat. TechCrunch reports: CEO Alex Ljung will step aside though remain chairman as former Vimeo CEO Kerry Trainor replaces him. Mike Weissman will become COO as SoundCloud co-founder and CTO Eric Wahlforss stays as chief product officer. New York investment bank Raine Group and Singapore's sovereign wealth fund Temasek have stepped in to lead the new Series F funding round of $169.5 million. SoundCloud declined to share the valuation or quantity of the new funding round. Yesterday, Axios reported the company was raising $169.5 million at a $150 million pre-money valuation. That's a steep decline in value from the $700 million it was valued at in previous funding rounds. The new Series F round supposedly gives Raine and Temasek liquidation preferences that override all previous investors, and the Series E investors are getting their preferences reduced by 40 percent. They're surely happy about that, but it's better than their investment vaporizing. Raine will get two board seats for bailing out SoundCloud, with partner and former music industry attorney Fred Davis, and the vice president who leads music investments, Joe Puthenveetil, taking those seats.

Posted
by
msmash
on Friday August 11, 2017 @06:40PM
from the what-were-they-thinking dept.

An anonymous reader shares a report: While some people may point at The Emoji Movie as the root of all that is wrong with Hollywood, The Wall Street Journal reports that the problem goes much deeper than a single misfire featuring Patrick Stewart as a poop emoji. WSJ reports that movie attendance has dropped by 5%, compared with the same period in 2016, and revenues are down, too, dipping just 2.9%, thanks to higher ticket prices making up for the lack of ticket sales. On Aug. 2, AMC shares dropped 27% in one day, the WSJ reports. While films like Beauty and the Beast, Wonder Woman, and Get Out fared well at the box office, they were the anomalies in a year full of box office disappointments. Instead of giving moviegoers more badass female leads and genre-bending horror films, Hollywood keeps throwing gobs of money at an unwanted fifth installment of Pirates of the Caribbean, more Transformers movies, and putting $175 million into King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, and then clutching their pearls in shock that no one wanted to see them.

Posted
by
msmash
on Friday August 11, 2017 @10:40AM
from the definitely-maybe dept.

The HBO hacker has struck yet again. From a report: Variety has obtained a copy of another message released Thursday by the anonymous hacker to select journalists in which HBO is apparently responding to the initial video letter that was sent informing the Time Warner-owned company of the massive data breach. The message from HBO, dated July 27, features the network's offer to make a "bounty payment" of $250,000 as part of a program in which "white hat IT professionals" are rewarded for "bringing these types of things to our attention." While the message takes a curiously non-confrontational tone in response to a hacker out to damage HBO, a source close to the investigation who confirmed the veracity of the email explained it was worded that way to stall for time while the company attempted to assess the serious situation.

Posted
by
BeauHDon Thursday August 10, 2017 @06:40PM
from the takes-two-to-tango dept.

According to Reuters, Amazon is seeking to partner with U.S. venue owners to sell event tickets -- a move that could loosen Ticketmaster's powerful grip on the lucrative ticketing business. From the report: The Seattle-based company sees the U.S. ticketing market as ripe for attack. Consumers dislike ticket fees, and venue owners, sports leagues and teams want more distributors for their tickets as they seek to boost sales. Access to tickets could be another means to lure members to the Amazon Prime shopping club. For music acts and sports teams, selling tickets through Amazon could help sell their merchandise. Currently Ticketmaster, owned by Live Nation Entertainment, is the exclusive seller of primary tickets for many top venues in the United States. Would-be challengers have struggled to compete in the face of Ticketmaster's strong relationships with the operators of major U.S. sports stadiums, arenas, concert halls and other venues. Amazon has had success with ticketing in Britain, where it has been selling seats to West End shows since 2015, even outselling Ticketmaster for some events, according to one of the sources, who owns venues in that country. It is less common for venues in Britain to have an exclusive ticket provider.

Posted
by
msmash
on Thursday August 10, 2017 @12:09PM
from the eureka-moment dept.

From a report: Facebook's push toward original video content will take a big step forward Thursday with the launch of a new section, dubbed Watch. The new tab, which Facebook FB, said late Wednesday will launch for a limited number of U.S. users for now, will feature about 40 original series, with plans to eventually scale up to hundreds of shows. Facebook said it will become available to more users in the coming weeks. The Mountain View, Calif., social network is hoping to tap into lucrative TV advertising revenue to boost its ever-expanding bottom line. If successful, Watch could stem the ad-load slowdown for the rest of the year that Chief Financial Officer David Wehner warned about last month when Facebook filed its quarterly earnings. Facebook also hopes the Watch tab will open up a new method of advertising that doesn't clutter users' News Feeds, and keep its 2 billion users on its site longer. Company's founder Mark Zuckerberg is understandably very excited about the move. He says the company believes "it's possible to rethink a lot of experiences through the lens of building community -- including watching video. Watching a show doesn't have to be passive. It can be a chance to share an experience and bring people together who care about the same things." If that pitch sounds familiar to you, it's because TV has been doing it for more than 75 years.

Posted
by
BeauHDon Wednesday August 09, 2017 @08:45PM
from the unintended-consequences dept.

Yesterday, Disney announced its intent to pull its movies from Netflix and start its own streaming service. This upset many users across the web as the whole appeal of the streaming model becomes diluted when there are too many "Netflixes." TorrentFreak argues that "while Disney expects to profit from the strategy, more fragmentation is not ideal for the public" and that the move "keeps piracy relevant." From the report: Although Disney's decision may be good for Disney, a lot of Netflix users are not going to be happy. It likely means that they need another streaming platform subscription to get what they want, which isn't a very positive prospect. In piracy discussions, Hollywood insiders often stress that people have no reason to pirate, as pretty much all titles are available online legally. What they don't mention, however, is that users need access to a few dozen paid services, to access them all. In a way, this fragmentation is keeping the pirate ecosystems intact. While legal streaming services work just fine, having dozens of subscriptions is expensive, and not very practical. Especially not compared to pirate streaming sites, where everything can be accessed on the same site.

Posted
by
BeauHDon Tuesday August 08, 2017 @08:10PM
from the distribution-deals dept.

Disney announced today that it will end its distribution deal with Netflix and launch its own streaming service in 2019. "The move is a real blow to Netflix, which secured a valuable streaming deal with Disney back in 2012 -- before streaming had really taken off," reports The Verge. "The deal only kicked into effect last year, so Netflix is barely seeing any benefit here." From the report: Netflix won't lose its Disney movies right away. Disney says it plans to cut Netflix off starting with the studio's 2019 films, and Netflix says it'll be able to keep all the Disney movies it gets through the end of that year. That means Netflix should be able to stream the next two Star Wars movies, but it'll miss out on the new trilogy's final installment. "We continue to do business with the Walt Disney Company on many fronts, including our ongoing deal with Marvel TV," said a spokesperson for Netflix. Disney's streaming service will be built off technology from BAMTech, the MLB-founded video streaming platform. Disney was already a major investor in BAMTech, and today it's making an even bigger investment -- of $1.58 billion -- giving it a 75 percent stake in the company. The acquisition still requires regulatory approval. The Disney-branded streaming service will be the "exclusive home in the U.S. for subscription-video-on-demand viewing," and will kick off with films including Toy Story 4 and the sequel to Frozen. "Original movies, TV shows, [and] short-form content" will be added to the service, and it'll be filled out with older movies from Disney and Pixar's catalog and shows from Disney's TV channels. The report also notes Disney plans to launch a streaming service exclusively for ESPN, targeted for launch early next year. "Disney is promising about '10,000 live regional, national, and international games and events a year,' with individual sports packages available as well," reports The Verge.